Wings
by PhoenixFalls
Summary: Submission for CopDoc Week on tumblr. Prompt was "wings." Most likely takes place in the Baby timeline but pre-Chuck.


Lauren woke up slowly, the sun streaming from the arched French windows opposite the bed, which pulled her away from unconsciousness as the beams settled warmly on her closed eyelids. She kept her eyes shut and waited for the heavy lead of sleep to flee her limbs while trying to recall the remnants of the dream she'd been having as it still clung stubbornly to the edges of her mind like spider silk. Lauren heard a low perturbed mumble from her bedmate and felt a heavy sigh of air cascade over the side of her neck, causing her to give up on trying to catch the rapidly fading images in her mind and open her eyes.

Tamsin was lying on her stomach, hair wild around her head and even with the curtains of blonde obscuring half her face; her restless frown was still visible. Lauren smiled gently and rolled onto her side to brush the hair out of the valkyrie's face, cooing gentle nonsense syllables when her pout deepened. Tamsin's expression smoothed into calmness and she blew air roughly past her lips, flinging her arm around Lauren's waist and burying her head further into her pillow, humming her satisfaction.

"Are you awake?" the doctor asked softly as she began to trace absentminded patterns on Tamsin's bare back, watching her eyes flicker back and forth under her eyelids.

"Nei," the fae mumbled back, her voice low and cracked with unconsciousness. "Jeg sover."

Lauren chuckled as Tamsin sighed herself further into whatever dream she'd been having and concentrated on ghosting the structures of various molecules on the soft skin under her fingertips, propping her head up with her other hand. She and the valkyrie had definitely not started out on the best of terms, to put it mildly, but found themselves wrapped up in the bonds of friendship with upsetting ease. Their romantic relationship was slower to build and had several false starts, as Tamsin was predictably and almost comically skittish about a long-term commitment to anything except her gun and Jack Daniels.

Lauren drew out the geometry of a sulfur hexafluoride molecule between Tamsin's shoulder blades and pondered the somewhat dichotomous nature of the sleeping valkyrie. The blonde fae was tough- no one could deny that- but beneath her armor of biting sarcasm and sincere threats of violence was a surprisingly sensitive woman whose ache to belong somewhere and be loved was very pronounced. Once one knew it that desire was there, it was almost vitreous no matter how desperately Tamsin worked to hide it.

Not for the first time, Lauren was reminded of an animal. Generally when her mind drifted into comparing her girlfriend with an animal, she thought of bears, or wolves, or lionesses; fierce and not to be trifled with but willing to take care of those they were connected to and exceedingly protective to the point of overriding their own instinct towards self-preservation. This time, however, she felt her thoughts meandering to the kea they'd seen at the zoo several months ago.

Tamsin had been wholly uninterested in the large parrots, claiming that their dull brownish-olive green coloring was "super disappointing and boring" but Lauren had insisted on hanging around the enclosure the birds were in because she wanted to know what they sounded like (completely ignoring Tamsin's pointed remark that they could look it up on YouTube when they got home).

One of the kea that had been settled on a branch finally let out a cacophonous stutter and flapped its wings impressively several times, showcasing brilliant red-orange feathers on the underside of its wings, which until then had been completely hidden. Lauren found herself comparing the other blonde to that kea now. Not that she was unimpressive or dull, anyone who knew Tamsin would never be able to think such things about her, but there was definitely parts of her that were normally hidden.

There was one side of her that everyone saw at first: cocky, brash, easily annoyed and almost equally as abrasive, but there was another side to her as well. Like the vivid feathers hidden away under the wings of the kea except to those who were looking, Tamsin's friendliness, vulnerability, empathy and gentleness were always there but they often took people who weren't expecting them by surprise. Once that side was seen though, you couldn't help but to be on the look out for it, just like they'd hung around the kea enclosure for another half hour waiting to see those brilliant coquelicot colored feathers again.

Lauren was pulled abruptly from her ruminating when Tamsin let out an antagonized whine and shifted her shoulders back and forth, bringing Lauren's attention to the fact that she'd stopped tracing configurations on the contours of Tamsin's back. Lauren smiled and set about reconstructing an octahedral shape on the shoulder blade closest to her and the valkyrie nodded her head once as if giving approval and yawned.

"Why're you awake?" the fae demanded, eyes still closed and words still thick as her efforts were more concentrated on shaking off sleep. "We're on vacation."

Lauren hummed out an 'uh-huh' and smoothed a hand down Tamsin's back as if wiping away the invisible marks left by her fingertip doodling. "I was just thinking." She informed lightly, leaning over to press her lips to a shoulder.

Tamsin cracked her eyes open and squinted exaggeratedly against the mellow natural light. "Of course you were." And though she had rolled her eyes, her tone was soft and amused. She pulled the arm she had around Lauren's waist tighter towards her, simultaneously tugging the human closer and shifting her own position. "What're you thinking about?"

"Kea." She responded promptly, scooting herself down so they were eye-level.

Tamsin frowned and didn't respond for several minutes as she tried to place the word. "Those loud ass birds from the zoo?" she asked, halfheartedly lifted her head from the pillow to check the alarm clock on Lauren's side of the bed. "You're thinking about parrots at six-thirty in the morning?"

Lauren smiled at the unsure tone in her girlfriend's voice and rolled onto her back, shrugging slightly and raising her arms over her head. "I guess," she sighed, doing her very best to sound fairly inconvenienced, "that I was thinking about you, too."

"That's more like it." Tamsin replied, pulling herself up so she was half on top of Lauren and peppering her neck with kisses. "Do I wanna know," she continued with a grin, briefly touching her lips to the sensitive spot behind one ear. "Why you were thinking about me and annoyingly loud parrots at the same time?"

"Well I was just thinking about how annoyingly loud you can be." Lauren said as-a-matter-of-factly, biting back a laugh and a groan in equal measure when Tamsin flicked her tongue against her earlobe and pulled on it gently with her teeth.

"Oh _I'm_ loud?" Tamsin scoffed, pulling back so Lauren could see her eyebrows raised in incredulity.

"Annoyingly." Lauren confirmed, tucking her lower lip between her teeth in an effort to stop the laugh in her throat from escaping to little effect.

"Arright, doc." The valkyrie agreed, her tone dangerous and her eyes dark. "Gimme an hour and we'll see who's _annoyingly _loud."

This time Lauren did laugh, wrapping her arms around Tamsin's neck and encouraging her downwards in order capture her lips, all thoughts of kea and their colorful wings being replaced by the sound of her name tumbling concupiscently out of the fae's mouth.


End file.
